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China Is Abusing AI. Chatbots are deftly disseminating Beijing’s talking points.
(www.theatlantic.com)
this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2026
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Oh, of course. I mean, it's an AI race, the more users you have, the better.
But you are right that I have not considered that it could be contributing to the attrocities China is doing domestically, especially with how is their social credit thing going (if that's still a thing, haven't really checked on it for decade at this point), adding a good AI to the mix is dreadful to think about.
Soo, yeah. From a strictly selfish point of view, it's probably better to send your personal data to china, assuming you're not likely to visit. That is assuming they are not selling their data to the US brokers, but it feels unlikely they'd be allowed to. The cost, however, is you're helping with enabling a regime with keeping their citizens in line.
On the other hand, US providers are the same, the regime just didn't have a headstart to have the oppression infrastructure already in place. So, yeah. The only winning move is not to play (or just have a local model).
I somehow doubt that's their goal. While a surveillance dystopia needs some image recognition and advanced algorithms and machine learning, I don't think it needs chatbots and large language models for programming nearly as much as they implement. It's probably part of the equation. But I don't think that's anywhere close to the reason why they do what they do. There's probably way more to it if you ask me.
And we're about to find out about the local models... Mind as of today, those are mostly designed by big tech companies or Chinese "startups" as well. Again not necessarily driven by benevolence.